Page 46 of The Christmas Stroll

The crowd began to loosen after that, the lanterns drifting off toward the ferry line, and the parked cars and the warm bright doorways, the handbells fading out over the water.

Helen and Marianne came down off the square onto the pavement, still trading opinions about the closing choral number, when a woman in a bright red coat stepped into their path and stopped them both.

Maggie watched from a few feet off. The woman was plainly a Stroll first-timer, cheeks scrubbed pink with the cold and the wonder of it all, and she reached out and caught one of Helen’s gloved hands in both of hers and then, before Helen could quite recover, one of Marianne’s as well, so that she stood there holding a hand of each.

“I just have to say thank you,” she said, and her voice wobbled with the sincerity of it. “We’re new to the island, staying up at Nantucket Shores. We’ve never witnessed anything like this, and it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. The lights, and the lanterns, and Santa on the water. I don’t know how you do it but I just wanted to thank the people who do.”

For a beat neither woman knew what to say. Then both of them started talking at once.

“Oh, well, it isn’t me, it’s Marianne who runs the … she handles all the coordination, the logistics, none of it would move an inch without - ”

“ - it’s Helen you should thank, she’s the one who keeps the soul of it all, I only shift the tents about, it’s her instinct for the tradition of it, the wreaths, the handbells, that’s what you’re really thanking - ”

They stopped. They looked at each other. Each had spent her sentence handing the credit to the other, and each had heard the other doing exactly the same, and the Nantucket Shores woman stood there between them holding both their hands and looking from one to the other in some confusion, and then Helen’s mouth twitched, and Marianne’s went, and the two of them laughed - really laughed, heads tipping, the sound of it warm and unguarded in the snowy dark.

“We make a,” Helen paused, and considered, “a good team.”

“Don’t push it,” said Marianne.”We make a reasonably good one.”

The woman beamed at them both, thanked them again, and went off to find her husband and Helen and Marianne stood a moment longer on the pavement in the falling snow.

Then Marianne hooked her arm through Helen’s without any ceremony at all, the way she must have done ten thousand times over the years. Helen let her, and the two of them turned and walked off up Main together into the thinning crowd.

Within a few steps, a cluster of the older natives folded around them - Dorothy Hatch, Evelyn Price, Eleanor Whitmore, half the committee - and swallowed them up, until Maggie lost sight of them, but their voices carried back over the heads of the crowd, Marianne’s crisp and Helen’s declarative, already mid-argument about something, and then a burst of laughter that was unmistakably the two of them together.

“Turns out all it took was a padlock.”

Will had come up beside Maggie without her marking exactly when. He stood on the pavement at her shoulder, the last of the lantern light gold on the snow at their feet, the shop windows still glowing down the whole length of Main and doubling in the dark glass.

“A padlock.” Maggie watched the place where the crowd had closed over her mother and his. “That was genius, you know. Sending Marianne one way and Helen the other. Two women who’d rather die than ask each other for help, both certain they were rescuing the whole thing single-handed.”

“Like you said, we just made sure the room existed.”

“And prayed.”

“Either way, it worked.” Will turned his head, and she felt him look at her, and she looked back, the snow coming down slow between them, catching the lights.

And there it was again - the thing that had nearly happened all those years ago behind the truck, and again this week in the snow on Main and last night on the café step. The thing the ringtones and the florists and the crises had kept interrupting.

“Well …”

They both jumped. Lucy had materialized again at Maggie’s other elbow with the last inch of her cocoa and an expression of profound, studied innocence, as she looked from Maggie to Will and back again, taking in the two coats pressed together, the two feet of charged air that was this time no feet at all.

Their friend let a pause stretch out one beat too long - the pause Maggie knew, the one that did all the work a sentence would have done less elegantly.

“I remember,” Lucy said to the snow, to the middle distance, to no one, “when the pair of you disappeared behind that truck on Federal Street at fourteen, and came back with the same look on your faces you’ve got right now.” She drank the last of her cocoa. “History repeats itself sometimes, doesn’t it?”

And she wandered off into the crowd before either of them could answer, humming something that might have been a carol or the sound of a woman extremely pleased with herself.

Maggie felt the heat come up her neck. Beside her, unmistakably, so did Will.

She caught it at the edge of her vision, the flush over his weathered cheek, the laugh lines going, and neither of them stepped away, and neither of them looked at the other, and the snow came down gold over the cobbles, and somewhere up ahead their mothers were arguing happily about next year.

The snow kept falling, slow and fat and unhurried, catching the gold of the shop lights on its way down and settling on the shoulders of Maggie’s coat, on the brim of the nearest lamppost wreath, on the iron railing of the bank steps where the choir had rung the weekend to its close.

Down toward the harbor the last of the lanterns were going out one by one as the volunteers doused them, and the star still blazed white over the wharf, throwing its light out across the black water.

Maggie let out a breath that was half a laugh, and swiped at her cheek with the sleeve of her coat, and felt the cold wool come away damp.